In kindergarten, I walked over a mile to/from the school every day unaccompanied. So did all the other kids in the neighborhood.

I walked to and from school in kindergarten. Google Maps says it was a little bit over a half-mile. The only issue that came up was on the first day of school, when not knowing what the buses were all about, I ended up on one. It didn't take long to get that straightened out, and it only happened once.

I suspect the events described in TFA are a consequence (not necessarily unintended) of our hyperlitigious society...consider, for instance, the sledding bans that have been popping up like metastatic tumors all over the place lately, or that you can't get someone to build you a pool with a diving board.

So who serves on juries of those who are mentally unstable, or politicians (or am I repeating myself?)

They help go toward intent and mood of the conversation. There's a difference between "I'll kill you" and "I'll kill you :)" as part of a conversation.

I had a university as a client last year and they had at least one Windows 3.1 system still in operation in a research capacity. XP is still all over the place.

Research data usually needs to be kept for 7-10 years after the conclusion of the grant, then usually stored much later after since the people involved have left and nobody knows what to do with it. In our research of a 2PB file server, over 1/2 of the data hadn't been touched in over a year. The desire there is to move the data to cheaper tape backup and free up spinning disk. The problem with that is it's cheaper to buy more spinning disk than it is to buy a brand new tape array that will last for 10-15 years and be able to store a few PB of data. Think of it as initial vs. incremental cost.

But the part about employees leaving and not knowing what to do with their data is a big one. I'm sure there's leftover data from when I parted ways with my previous employer - I was there for 11 years and did a lot of work for them during that time, with data scattered all over the place. But since I'm gone there's no way they can ask me to come back and help, so all they have is what's left and if they delete any of that they have no idea what they're going to lose.

Not much more to be said about it. The staff will know how to react when there's real problems rather than searching for passwords and documentation for some system they haven't touched in 6 months..

I have some, had some sales last year too. Doesn't need to be much, there's only a few thousand dollars in it.

That's what changed in 4.4. In 4.3 it was part of the OS is my understanding and required a new OS install.

For cell phones that have an average life of 2-3 years?

Google wants market share. And they have it.

Google doesn't need to fix it. There's Android developers at Samsung, LG, etc. that can fix it as well. There's no interest at any level to fix an old bug like that.

Google doesn't make the version of Android that goes out on e.g. Samsung phones. Google can patch 4.3 ll they want, but it's up to Samsung to take the patch, implement it, test it on all their devices, then get blessing from the various carriers to send it out. Given there's still people out there with S3s (and probably S2s) there's no chance they're going to put the effort into it and instead tell people to get the shiny new S5.

Radio, on the other hand, even if you hear a piece of music that you like, the chance of actually being told the name of the artist is close to zero.

Many car radios at least will display artist/title information on FM, if the station provides it. If they don't (or if yours doesn't do that), you can fire up SoundHound or something similar and see what it says.